It's not strictly true that there’s only one Die Hard — there have been five now. But there's still only one that really matters: the first. Die Hard cut the template for great action movies — the lone hero taking back a whole building that has been seized by ruthless terrorists.

Olympus Has Fallen outrageously raises the stakes on that story. North Korean terrorists assault the White House (codename Olympus), from the air and the ground, and, thanks to subterfuge and treachery as well as comprehensive slaughter, they capture the President (lantern-jawed Aaron Eckhart) and hold him hostage in the underground bunker meant to ensure his safety. But they haven’t counted on the presence in the ruined building of the one man who has the knowledge, ruthlessness and determination to stop them — former Presidential bodyguard Mike Banning (Gerard Butler), our hero.

Mike is raring to go, having fallen into disgrace through no fault of his own in the pre-credits sequence. On a wintry expedition from Camp David, the car carrying the President and his wife crashes on a bridge — and as his bodyguard, Mike correctly saves the President first but fails to get to his wife in time. So he’s stewing in a desk job at the Treasury when he sees the White House going up in smoke out of the window and dashes over to give his all.

The film shows the White House being taken down with a kind of fantastic effrontery — yet after 9/11 we know that fantastic effrontery can succeed in the most catastrophic way, in reality as well as in the movies. Butler, co-producer as well as star, has said in the publicity for this film: “Remember, 9/11 was as simple as some guys taking a box cutter onto a plane. That’s what grabbed me about this, how relevant and provocative it was” — and shameless and opportunistic, of course.

The spectacle of this ultimate enclave of Western power being trashed is pretty astounding, it has to be said. Somehow the Koreans have got hold of a Hercules C-130 gunship that devastates the entire area before striking the Washington Monument as it crashes, the obelisk collapsing just like the Twin Towers.

Then terrorists disguised as tourists begin a full-scale assault, backed up by heavy guns concealed in dumper trucks. This sequence, filmed at a White House reconstructed in Shreveport, rather than relying on CGI, is fast and furious — the director, Antoine Fuqua (Training Day and Shooter), knows how to make action exciting, however preposterous.

Gerard Butler plays it straight as the hard man, without the jokey self-deprecation that makes Bruce Willis endearing — no yippee-ki-yay for him. Quite straight-faced, he promises: “I’m going to stick my knife through your brain.” His best line comes when he tells the terrorist leader: “Why don’t you and I play a game of fuck off — you go first.” Definitely one to use, though maybe only at the weekend.

As the President, spending most of the film chained to a railing and then abjectly begging Jack to kill his enemy for him, Aaron Eckhart makes the best of his humiliation, not restricted to his role. The film couldn’t make it plainer: he’s only a B-grade action hero these days, compared to Gerard.

That America’s enemy should be North Korea seems at first uncomfortably timely. At breakfast before his busy day Jack watches the TV news about missile tests and tension along the DMZ, just as we have all done recently — and the terrorists demand withdrawal of US troops and the Fifth Fleet, before revealing a plan to subject the United States to nuclear devastation. “Your country will be a cold, dark wasteland — now too America shall know suffering and famine!” gloats the baddie.

But there’s no serious interest or intent. It’s never made clear whether the attack has been commissioned by Pyongyang or not, while the terrorists actually infiltrate the White House in the guise of a South Korean mission, as if it’s hard to remember the difference between them. Presumably the film began development several years ago and the attackers were made North Korean largely to avoid the complications of making them Middle Eastern and Islamic.

The real trauma being revisited and exploited here is America’s own, 9/11. (It is slyly mentioned in a news bulletin that “in the Middle East the response to the attack on the White House is jubilant”, just as happened then.) The film ends in grotesque pomp and sentimentality, as the President celebrates his victory: “This is our time, our chance to get back to the best of who we are. May God bless the United States of America.”